Empire Read online

  “That’s why there is no comparison between America and Rome,” said Torrent. “Our empire can’t fall because we aren’t an empire. We have never passed from our republican stage to our imperial one. Right now we buy and sell and, occasionally, bully our way into other countries, but when they thumb their noses at us, we treat them as if they had a right, as if there were some equivalence between our nation and their puny weakness. Can you imagine what Rome would have done if an ‘ally’ treated them the way France and Germany have been treating the United States?”

  The class laughed.

  Reuben Malich did not laugh. “The fact that we don’t act like Rome is one of the best things about America,” he said.

  “So isn’t it ironic,” said Torrent, “that we are vilified as if we were like Rome, precisely because we aren’t? While if we did act like Rome, then they’d treat us with the respect we deserve?”

  “My head a-splode,” said one of the wittier students, and everyone laughed again. But Torrent pushed the point.

  “America is at the end of its republic. Just as the Roman Senate and consuls became incapable of ruling their widespread holdings and fighting off their enemies, so America’s antiquated Constitution is a joke. Bureaucrats and courts make most of the decisions, while the press decides which Presidents will have enough public support to govern. We lurch forward by inertia alone, but if America is to be an enduring polity, it can’t continue this way.”

  Even though Torrent’s points actually agreed with much of what Reuben believed was wrong with contemporary America, he could not let the historical point stand unchallenged—the two situations could not be compared. “The Roman Republic ended,” said Reuben, “because the people got sick of the endless civil wars among rival warlords. They were grateful to have a strong man like Octavian eliminate all rivals and restore peace. That’s why they were thrilled to have him put on the purple and rename himself as Augustus.”

  “Exactly,” said Torrent, leaning across the table and pointing a finger at him. “Of course a soldier sees straight to the crux of the matter. Only a fool thinks the turns of history can be measured by any standard other than which wars were fought, and who won them. Survival of the fittest—that’s the measure of a civilization. And survival is ultimately determined on the battlefield. Where one man kills another, or dies, or runs away. The society whose citizens will stand and fight is the one with the best chance to survive long enough for history even to notice it.”

  One of the students made the obligatory comment about how concentrating on war omits most of history. At which Torrent smiled and gestured for Reuben to answer.

  “The people who win the wars write the histories,” said Reuben dutifully, wondering why he was getting this sudden burst of respect from Torrent.

  “Augustus kept most of the forms of the old system,” Torrent went on. “He refused to call himself king, he pretended the Senate still meant something. So the people loved him for protecting their republican delusions. But what he actually established was an empire so strong that it could survive incompetents and madmen like Nero and Caligula. It was the empire, not the republic, that made Rome the most important enduring polity in history.”

  “You’re saying America needs to do the same thing?” asked Reuben Malich.

  “Not at all!” said Torrent, acting out a parody of horror. “God forbid! I’m just saying that if America is going to ever matter to history the way Rome does, instead of being a brief episode like the Sassanid or Chaldean empires, then it will be because we spawn our own Augustus, to rule where right now we only buy and sell.”

  “Then I hope we fall first,” said Reuben Malich. He knew as he spoke that he should have confined this comment to his Arabic notes. This was the trap Torrent had led him into, by showing him respect; yet, knowing he was being exposed and would surely be cut apart for it, he could not hold silence—because if he did, the other students would be sure this soldier longed for empire, just as Torrent apparently did. “America exists as an idea,” Reuben said, “and if we throw out that idea, then there’s no reason for America to exist at all.”

  “Oh, Soldier Boy, you poor lad,” said Torrent. “The American idea was thrown out with Social Security. We nailed the coffin shut with group rights. We don’t want individual liberty because we don’t want individual responsibility. We want somebody else to take care of us. If we had a dictator who did a better job of it than our present system, then as long as he pretended to respect Congress, we’d lick his hands like dogs.”

  The whole seminar recoiled from his words, though not because they thought he was wrong; it was because he sounded like some kind of neo-conservative.

  “Again,” Torrent reminded them, “I’m not advocating anything, I’m only observing. We’re historians, not politicians. We have to look at how polities actually function, not how we wish to delude ourselves into thinking they ought to function. Our short-term politics trump long-term national interests every time. Can’t fix Social Security, can’t fix the tax structure, can’t fix the trade deficit, can’t fix outsourcing, can’t fix anything because there’s always campaign money involved, or demagoguery that blocks the way. Between the NRA and the AARP, you can’t even do things that vast majorities already agree need to be done! Democracy on this scale doesn’t work, it hasn’t worked for years. And as for that American idea, we flushed it away with the Great Depression, and nobody misses it.” Then he grinned. “Except maybe Soldier Boy.”

  Princeton University was just what Reuben expected it to be—hostile to everything he valued, smug and superior and utterly closed-minded. In fact, exactly what they thought the military was.

  He kept thinking, the first couple of semesters, that maybe his attitude toward them was just as short-sighted and bigoted and wrong as theirs was of him. But in class after class, seminar after seminar, he learned that far too many students were determined to remain ignorant of any real-world data that didn’t fit their preconceived notions. And even those who tried to remain genuinely open-minded simply did not realize the magnitude of the lies they had been told about history, about values, about religion, about everything. So they took the facts of history and averaged them with the dogmas of the leftist university professors and thought that the truth lay somewhere in the middle.

  Well as far as Reuben could tell, the middle they found was still far from any useful information about the real world.

  Am I like them, just a bigot learning only what fits my worldview? That’s what he kept asking himself. But finally he reached the conclusion: No, he was not. He faced every piece of information as it came. He questioned his own assumptions whenever the information seemed to violate it. Above all, he changed his mind—and often. Sometimes only by increments; sometimes completely. Heroes he had once admired—Douglas MacArthur, for instance—he now regarded with something akin to horror: How could a commander be so vain, with so little justification for it? Others that he had disdained—that great clerk, Eisenhower, or that woeful incompetent, Burnside—he had learned to appreciate for their considerable virtues.

  And now he knew that this was much of what the Army had sent him here to learn. Yes, a doctorate in history would be useful. But he was really getting a doctorate in self-doubt and skepticism, a Ph.D. in the rhetoric and beliefs of the insane Left. He would be able to sit in a room with a far-left Senator and hear it all with a straight face, without having to argue any points, and with complete comprehension of everything he was saying and everything he meant by it.

  In other words, he was being embedded with the enemy as surely as when he was on a deep Special Ops assignment inside a foreign country that did not (officially at least) know that he was there.

  Princeton University as an alien planet. Reuben Malich as the astronaut who somehow lost his helmet—and spent day after day gasping for air.

  He had to acquire the iron discipline of the soldier who works with the government—the ability to stand in the same room with stupidity a
nd say nothing, show nothing.

  The real danger was not losing his temper, however. For in the second year of his studies, he realized that he was beginning to treat some of the most absurd ideas as if they had some basis in truth. It was Goebbels in practice: If you tell the same lies long enough and loudly enough, even people who know better will despair and concede the point.

  We are tribal animals. We cannot long stand against the tribe.

  Thank heaven he could go home to Cecily every day. She was his reality check. Unlike the ersatz Left of the university, Cessy was a genuine old-fashioned liberal, a Democrat of the tradition that reached its peak with Truman and blew its last trumpet with Moynihan.

  It was part of the insanity of their marriage—the reason his father kept asking him, right up to the wedding itself, “Do you have any idea what you’re doing?”

  Because not only was Reuben committed to conservative values, he was also a Serbian by ancestry and upbringing—an Orthodox Christian with a native knowledge of the language of Serbia because his parents made sure of it.

  And Cessy was Croatian—Catholic, yes, but also of the tribe that Serbians hated more than any. Once Serbs and Croats had been the same people. But the Turks had long ruled Serbia, while Croatia was sheltered within Catholic Austria-Hungary. What did Croats know of oppression and suffering? And when the Nazis came, they collaborated with the conquerors, and the price of their perfidy was paid in Serbian blood.

  Nobody forgot things like this in the Balkans. Such injuries were nursed generation after generation. So when Reuben came home from Ohio State with a Croatian girl, and then left her with his family while he went off to begin serving his ROTC obligation to his country, his parents were appalled.

  She won them over completely. It was hard to believe that anyone could get past Father’s cast-iron hatred of Croats, but Cessy had insisted that she’d do just fine, now go off and be a soldier for a while. And when Reuben came home on leave the first time, it quickly became clear that not only did his family like Cessy, they liked her a lot more than they liked Reuben. Oh, they said they still loved him best, but he knew it was just to make him feel better. They adored Cessy.

  And that was fine with him. “You should be our U.N. ambassador,” he told her on that first leave. “You could get Hutus and Tutsis to be friends. You could get Israelis and Palestinians to hug and kiss. Hindus and Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs, Shia and Baha’i, Basque and Spaniard—”

  “Not Basques and Spaniards,” she told him. “That dates back to when there were still mastodons in Europe. That’s practically like Cro-Magnon versus Neandertal.”

  “I want our babies to be as smart as you and as tough as me,” he said.

  “I just want them to look like me,” said Cessy. “Because having daughters that look like you would be cruel.”

  Their daughters did look like Cessy, and their sons had Reuben’s lean, lithe body, and all in all, their family life was perfect. That’s what he came home to every day from school; that was the environment in which he studied. That was his root in reality that kept calling him back from the brink of getting seduced into the fantasyland of academia.

  Until Averell Torrent decided he wanted Reuben’s soul.

  Reuben had been goaded by professors before. He goaded them by wearing his uniform to every class on the first day. They took it as a personal affront. Why shouldn’t they? That’s how he meant it.

  Some of them simply ignored him the rest of the semester—until his coursework forced them to give him an A. Others declared war on him, but their ham-handed attacks on Reuben always backfired, winning him the sympathy of the other students as Reuben answered all the attacks with unflagging courtesy and quiet good sense. Many of the others would begin defending him—and, by extension, the military. Thus Reuben would quietly lose all the classroom battles for the hearts and minds of the students, but win the war.

  With Torrent, though, as they worked their way through the ancient long-lived empires—Egypt, China—and the ancient republics—first Athens, now Rome—it became for the other students a class in watching Torrent and Reuben spar with each other. They weren’t angry at Reuben—they knew that Torrent always initiated their long, classtime-consuming exchanges—but they still resented the fact that Reuben Malich had hijacked their only class with the great man.

  Can’t help it, Reuben silently answered their huffish attitudes. He calls on me. What am I supposed to do, cover my ears and hum loudly so I can’t hear his questions?

  Though he was getting tempted to do just that. Because what Torrent was saying about America and empire made perverse sense. While the other students sidetracked themselves into a discussion about whether Torrent’s statements were “conservative” or “liberal,” “reactionary” or “politically correct,” Reuben could not shake off Torrent’s premise—that America was not in the place Rome was in before it fell, but rather in the place where Rome was before civil war destroyed the Republic and led to the dictatorship of the Caesars.

  So when Torrent had finally silenced the other students’ attempts to put his remarks into one or another of present-day political camps, Reuben was ready to speak.

  “Sir,” he said, “if civil war is a necessary precursor to the end of democracy—”

  “The façade of democracy.”

  “Then it means our republic, such as it is, is safe. Because we don’t have warlords. We don’t have private armies.”

  “You mean ‘so far,’ ” Torrent said at once. “You mean ‘that we know about.’ ”

  “We aren’t Yugoslavia,” said Reuben—the most obvious example, for him at least. “We don’t have clear ethnic divisions.”

  Again, a storm of protest from the other students. What about blacks? Hispanics? Jews?

  They debated that for a while, but Reuben was determined to stay on track. “We can have riots, but not sustained wars, because the sides are too geographically mixed and the resources are too one-sided.”

  Torrent shook his head. “The seeds of civil war are always there, in every country. England in the 1600s—nobody would have believed that those pesky Puritans could provoke a Royalist versus Puritan civil war, and yet they did.”

  “So where do you think America might divide itself into two factions that could fight a sustained civil war?” Reuben demanded.

  Torrent smiled. “Red state, blue state.”

  “That’s cheap media graphics. You might as well say rural versus urban.”

  “I do say that. But the geographical division is still clear. The Northeast and the West Coast against the South and the middle, with some states torn apart because they’re so evenly balanced.”

  “No one’s going to fight over those differences.”

  Torrent smiled his maddening superior smile. “The rhetoric today is already as hot-blooded and insane and hate-filled as it was over slavery before the first Civil War—and even then, most people refused to believe war was possible until Fort Sumter fell.”

  “One thing,” said Reuben. “One tiny thing.”

  “Yes?” said Torrent.

  “The U.S. Army is absolutely dominated by red-state ideals. There are some blue-staters, yes, of course. But you don’t join the military, as a general rule, unless you share much of the red-state ideology.”

  “So because the red-staters control the Army, you think there can’t be a civil war.”

  “I think it’s unlikely.”

  “Don’t hedge on me.”

  Reuben shrugged. He wasn’t hedging, he was specifying; but let Torrent think whatever he wanted.

  “What if the White House were in the control of blue-staters?” asked Torrent. “What if the President ordered American troops to fire on American citizens who fought for red-state ideals?”

  “We obey the President, sir.”

  “Because you’re thinking you’d be called to fire on neo-fascist militia nut groups from Montana,” said Torrent. “What if you were told to fire on the Alabama National Gu
ard?”

  “If Alabama was in rebellion, then I’d do it at once.”

  “If,” said Torrent. “We just got our first ‘if’ from Soldier Boy. You would obey the President ‘if.’ ” Torrent grinned in triumph. “Civil wars are fought when leaders find out what those ‘ifs’ are and exploit them. I would only shoot at my neighbor ‘if.’ And then a politician tells you that the ‘if’ has happened.”

  They all regarded Torrent in silence, waiting for the clincher that they knew was coming.

  “The ideology doesn’t matter. You’re right, no one cares enough. So here’s when you’ll get ready to shoot your neighbor: When you’re convinced that your neighbor is arming himself to shoot you.”

  Reuben well knew how that worked. Few Serbs, Croats, or Muslims in the old Yugoslavia even imagined they could go to war—the intermarriage rate was so high that it was obvious you could never sort out one group from another.

  But all it took was a handful of nuts with guns shooting at you because your parents were Croats, even if you never cared. If they’re attacking you because you’re part of a group, then when you fire back, you do it as a member of that group. “You get forced onto one side or the other whether you want to or not,” said Reuben, “once the bullets start to fly.”

  “The bullets don’t even have to fly,” said Torrent, nodding. “You just have to believe they’re trying to shoot you. Wars are fought because we believe the other team’s threats.”

  “Which suggests,” said Reuben, “that wars are also lost because one side didn’t believe until it was too late.”

  “There we have it,” said Torrent, looking around triumphantly at the rest of the class. “Right here in this class, I have persuaded a highly trained soldier who hates the idea of civil war to think about the possibility.”

  The others laughed and looked at Reuben Malich with some mixture of mockery and sympathy. He had fallen into Torrent’s trap.

  Only Reuben knew better. Torrent was a serious historian. So was Reuben. Torrent was right. A civil war could be fought anywhere, if somebody had the will, the wit, and the power to pull the right strings, push the right buttons, light the right fires.